On July 13, 2008 I
found myself in a once-in-a-lifetime situation when I
happened to catch a few seconds of a road
rage incident
on video and gave it to the police to help with the case.
Later, I was astonished to see a freeze-frame from it at the
top of the front page of Oregon's largest paper, but I soon
found out that the footage had been on the Today
show, Inside Edition, and (apparently) every evening
news broadcast in the country. Google searches showed
references to this in Italy, Thailand, just about anywhere
you could imagine.

No one was ultimately
harmed (physically, anyway - a couple of folks had their
lives upended, though) in this incident, which is certainly
a good thing. But the frenzy around it was unsettling to me;
as soon as it was published (including some really stupid
factual errors) the story was around the world and it made
me wonder: how accurate are the stories I know nothing about
but read all the time? If something as small as this could
have errors in it (some of which I won't go into as they
really should be kept in the courtroom, as far as I'm
concerned) because of a feeding frenzy does that bode well
for our acceptance of everything else we read in the
Oregonian or hear on the Today show? A small
example: somewhere, somebody got the idea the video was
taken with a cell phone and you can tell from the headlines
that the media thought this was a cool concept. My cell
phone doesn't even take stills, let alone video, but never
mind: CELL PHONE CAPTURES ROAD RAGE INCIDENT, blared the
trumpets. As a guitar player I know only too well that you
can't take back a note once it's been played.

I also found the
immediate media concern trolling a little hard to take. When
I told one local TV station's door-to-door news crew I
really didn't want to participate in the whole process
because it seemed like they were trying to sensationalize
the issue the reporter popped up with "But you might have
some information that's vital! And if you didn't speak up
the case might be harmed! Then how would you feel?" And I
lost track of how many times I was asked to describe how I
felt when I was filming the incident, always framed as a
leading question telling me how I should have been
feeling and cueing up the response they had in mind but
which I never did give to anyone.

The most amusing
things I saw were comments to the Oregonian's story
online, which assured me that the entire event had been
staged and that the photos were hoaxes. I really did try to
figure out how you could stage something like this and get
an arrest in less an hour but I just couldn't do it; I'm
simply not creative enough.

When I gave the
footage to the police I had no intention of making money
from it, and in fact it never even occurred to me that they
would release it - I thought since it's copyrighted material
they could only release it with my consent (and my contact
info was written in VERY LARGE letters on the disk
containing the file) but I was certainly wrong. Since
everybody and his brother in the media was running this
thing and making money from it (you make money off this by
selling commercials; it's called content) I felt it
was only fair that I get a few shekels of trickle-down too.
That's when I realized that there is a real lack of
something that I will call the Accidental
Mediast FAQ. The
AMFAQ needs to be written and posted with clear Google
references so you can find it easily, and it tells people in
the position I was in what they can do and how much they can
charge...but I was flying blind. So here are a couple of
tidbits for you should you ever find yourself in this
particular time-dependant situation, and remember that the
phrase "time-dependant" is understating things by an order
of magnitude. You have to work fast, and that works against
you if you don't understand the process.

First off, and remember this: make
the arrangements with everybody yourself. I didn't understand
how this works and it cost me some money. You don't need to speak to
agencies that represent the networks; you can speak to them directly
yourself, and if you're in the middle of something like this where they
are running your footage right now they will actually call you back.
You won't know who to call but start with your local TV station, tell
them they are running your copyrighted footage and you'd like to get
paid for it. Then, while you're doing that ask for a contact number
for the parent network itself so you can do the same thing there. It
really is that simple.

You need to negotiate
deals with two kinds of entities - the local media and the
national media. The local TV stations will pay you what's
called a "stringer" fee - in other words, they will pay you
as though they had hired you to shoot something for them in
a normal fashion. If you have a REALLY big story and really
big balls you could probably ask for more; try it and see
how far it gets you, I guess. I didn't think I had the new
Zapruder footage. Ditto for the local paper. Now, although
you have worked something out with the local media, you
still have to contact the parent media and go through the
same process, but the dollar amounts are different.
Nationally, right now in 2008, you can ask (and get) $500
per network for something like this. Local stringer fees are
probably going to be in the $75-100 range. As you can see,
it adds up, and I am guessing that if you have access to
somebody who actually knows how to milk the whole thing (in
other words, somebody who knows the right people) it could
probably be considerably more. I'm sure I've missed some
opportunities to make money off this but obsessing about
cities of gold is something I'll leave to dead
Conquistadors.

But if you ever stumble across the
AMFAQ email me about it, okay? And increase your skepticism level.

Update: some of the comments on
YouTube (there are several versions of this there) really outdo those
on the Oregonian. I'll also mention that Newsweek also
contacted me about the story and used a quote from me to close the article,
which can be found here.